


our monuments are all around

by endquestionmark



Category: Injection - Fandom
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 12:31:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6470074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In those first few days — that confused giddy week of not knowing, of waiting for Brigid to transcribe Robin’s instructions and seeing if, in fact, it could be done; of waiting for the mechanism itself to be set into motion so that they could go out into a world made new, the parameters of reality and existence just a little more generous then they had been previously — they were much more quiet than usual, all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our monuments are all around

**Author's Note:**

> All baleful stares should be directed at [Mari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung); this is set previous to the comic's present, and interpolated through flashbacks up to issue 5, not to mention entirely gratuitous and setting-based, ft. excessive Arthuriana and very clever people who have made a very bad decision for very good reasons.

In those first few days — that confused giddy week of not knowing, of waiting for Brigid to transcribe Robin’s instructions and seeing if, in fact, it could be done; of waiting for the mechanism itself to be set into motion so that they could go out into a world made new, the parameters of reality and existence just a little more generous then they had been previously — they were much more quiet than usual, all of them. Even Viv, usually so constitutionally incapable of shutting up, managed it: he arrived at the office early, certainly, and read the paper while sitting at the head of the big conference room table, and made no attempt to be any ostentatious than usual about it, but if he observed anything different, he kept it to himself. Brigid, in various postures — lying on the sofa, hunched over in the corner, and on one memorable occasion standing behind the door — wrote, and so they all waited.

Maria would have been nervous about it, if she had been capable. She had passed that point, though, several weeks back in the waiting area of a tattoo parlor, as Viv exposited about possible equivalencies between their work and the creation of a sort of existential keloid scar in the Socratic tradition. “Claw-like,” he had said, “and with the capacity for sudden pain or irritation. The definition of an unshakeable gadfly, wouldn’t you say?”

“Isn’t that Sim’s bit?” Brigid hadn’t moved. Her eyes were closed as the artist worked on her wrist, fine outlining, and she hadn’t opened them. Maria looked over anyway, just in time for Brigid to grin, mimicking the rough broad curl of Simeon’s pronunciation. “Come on, Brigid, I wouldn’t say it was any different from any other school really, we just went punting and fucked statues when we weren’t reading Homer in the original Akkadian.” Her grin had gotten wider and nastier as the sentence went on. Maria wondered, as she did every time Brigid smiled like that, how so much uncompromising Stanley-knife malice could fit into such a small frame.

“Greek,” Simeon said. “Not Akkadian, unless you mean Gilgamesh. You’re crossing your—” He had looked at Brigid and sighed, then. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

“It was the statue-fucking, wasn’t it,” Brigid said, unperturbed. “Takes you right back. I knew it.”

“Nothing to add, Viv?” said Robin, from his place against the wall, and Viv shrugged.

“Not in polite company,” he said.

“Please,” Maria said, hurriedly. “Really. We don’t need to know.” She hesitated. “Although I must admit — well, actually — no, we don’t. Never mind. I really won’t be able to unthink that, and I’ve already thought about it far too much.”

“Maria,” Brigid said, and Maria had glared at her reflexively. “Have you _really_ now.”

“In the last three seconds,” Maria said, “which honestly feel like a lifetime. Could we please go back to keloid scars?”

“Oh, like that’s better,” Simeon said, but he had lapsed into silence, the moment underwritten by the buzz of the needle, a comfortable lull full of knowable potential.

Anyway: it had rained, the sky going dark like a wash, like ink dropped into a glass of water, and they had taken Maria up on her suggestion and gotten, collectively, heroically drunk. Stumbling back to the office in the rain, they had stopped under the awning of the chip shop downstairs to sort out their various addresses and directions, and Maria said: “Don’t tell me you’re sleeping here.”

Robin looked around, and then seemed to realize that she was talking to him. “Me,” he said, as if to make sure, and shrugged. “Better than my workshop, and I’d rather not go home in this weather. It always seems like too much space for one person, anyway.”

Maria had realized, then, that she had no idea where Robin lived when he was neither working nor at the office, sleeping on the broken sofa in the back room. Too much space: it made sense, she supposed, from what little she knew of Robin’s line. A Norman name, spelling unaltered, was indicative of an old family, with history and holdings to match. “That sofa already smells moldy,” she said, instead, pulling her coat a little tighter and considering, sadly, the soaked hem of her skirt where it brushed over her insteps. Knowing its futility, she edged a little further under the awning. “The rain’s only going to make it worse.”

“Robin,” Brigid said, coming out of nowhere, or perhaps simply rising up from below Maria’s line of sight.

“Oh God,” Robin said, and then: “Sorry. Reflex.”

Brigid completely ignored him. “Did you say too much space?”

Maria, grateful to be ignored, abstractly considered abstractly how astonishingly menacing Brigid managed to be — beyond any and all reasonable expectations — even with her hair plastered flat by the rain, and her expression as innocuously blank as it ever got.

Viv insinuated himself into the conversation. “I confess a certain curiosity,” he said, and Simeon snorted.

“You? Really? Don’t you already know the exact coordinates of all the skeletons in all of our closets?”

“Figurative coordinates are much more subjective,” Viv said, serenely. “And of course in certain cases it is much more polite to feign ignorance, or at least to simulate it as closely as possible.”

Brigid folded her arms. “So that’s a yes.”

“Consider it a request,” Viv said, not looking at her.

“Really?” Robin looked at Viv, then, shoved his hands into his pockets and then took them out again, and raked his fingers through his hair. Viv shrugged.

“I’d like to see it,” Maria said, and was surprised to find that she meant it. She wanted to know what it was like to live in a house so big that it felt empty, to listen to the rhythm of rain on slate and the emptiness of a night unpunctuated by the distant shuddering schedule of commuter rail. She wanted, oddly, to see Robin in his element rather than out of it, to see him comfortably in the setting that he so persistently avoided for the most part.

“All right,” Robin said, but he didn’t look at her, just brushed his hair out of his eyes again before jamming his hands back into his pockets. “But we’ll have a hell of a time finding a cabbie who’ll take us that far.”

“I believe I can do something about that,” Viv said, and Simeon glared at him.

“You and your drivers,” he said. “You’re worse than a diplomat.”

“Considerably,” Viv agreed, and went off to make a call, or look meaningfully at a complete stranger, or whatever he did when he wanted to summon transportation. A few crowded minutes passed — the awning was nominal at best, and designed to discourage lingerers — before a black car pulled up. It was ostentatious, in the way that all Viv’s things were, a little oversized and a little intimidating and a little obnoxious, just enough to throw off the casual onlooker, but not particularly spacious. Maria found herself crowded up against the window, bag in her lap, and Brigid made some speculative noises about jamming Robin into the footwell, but eventually Viv was persuaded to surrender the passenger seat to accommodate Simeon’s bulk and, presumably, Robin was spared the indignity.

Maria didn’t follow particularly closely, preoccupied as she was with the tear-tracks of the rain on the window glass, the branching microcosmic deltas. It became clear after a moment that they were moving, and she wondered abstractly about modeling the flow: the coating on the glass, and the effects of air resistance, and the composition of the rain itself. An increasingly known world, whose parameters they had just shifted: it was like being a child again, with no concept of permanence, no sense of routine, no idea that the days would not go on the same way forever, and no reason to want anything else. It was really, she thought, like magic. Anything could happen. Anything might.

It wasn’t such a long drive after all, or perhaps she had drifted off for part of it; Simeon and Brigid were quiet for once, and Viv was no doubt performing some mental dissection, some retrospective internal review of the evening for the sake of his own records. Robin only spoke to remind the driver — red hair, cropped short, dressed like a diplomatic attaché with the demeanor of a special forces veteran; _two can play at that_ , Maria thought sardonically in Viv’s direction — of the directions. Maria watched for the occasional flash of lights, the on-off blink of cat’s eyes, and leaned her head against the window to listen for the occasional northward rumble of lorries, the sudden needle-skip roughness of the road.

After a while, the lights came fewer and farther between, and then stopped altogether, and the world got a little more quiet. The sky seemed to open a little, too, beyond the roadside brush and the scrubby oaks on the other side of the ditch: fields, it felt like, and then a brief interlude of hedgerows, the uneven organic slopes of thatched roofs amidst the neat delineations of tile and slate, uneven stone walls and creeping vines. The rain had cleared, turning first to drizzle and then to mist, and had settled as a sort of diffuse blurriness which seemed to suit the setting. There would be a church now, any minute, Maria thought, all low ceilings and local stone, with a churchyard to match, and yes: there it was. The car turned then, off the main road and onto what felt like cobbles, jostling them against one another, and Maria sat up a little more.

“Are we there yet,” Brigid said, voice flat and atonal, and Simeon snorted.

“You won’t be able to see it very well until morning,” Robin said, and Maria gathered that he was jammed against the opposite window. He didn’t sound any different, not the way that Maria did whenever she went home. As much as such a thing was possible anymore, anyway: Maria had always gotten the impression that her departure had, eventually, become a matter of relief rather than loss. More an atrophic scar than a keloid, she thought vaguely, and wondered what Viv would say about the implications of smoothed-over absence as opposed to overgrown loss. The car shuddered to a halt, and Brigid yawned audibly. “I’ll let you in, and sleep in the annex, so you don’t have to worry about imposing,” Robin went on, undoing his seat belt.

“That’s stupid,” Brigid said, and Simeon snorted again.

“Be polite,” he said. Maria, turning away to fumble the door open, didn’t see Brigid’s gesture, but extrapolated its suggestions, and was completely unsurprised by both their tone and their nature.

“Well, I could sleep on a bathmat,” she said, instead, and almost overbalanced — it had been a while after all, then — unsteady on her feet after what must have been a matter of hours rather than minutes, as she had previously thought. She caught herself, and heaved her bag onto her shoulder, and began to get her bearings.

“You won’t have to,” Robin said, looking up as Maria came around the car, and that was the impression of the place which she carried with her afterwards: the look on his face was one of nervous excitement, a simultaneous matter of eagerness and fear, the uncertain apprehension of the returned prodigal. Robin wasn’t sleeping in the annex for their comfort, but rather for his own. Looking at the house, the vague mass of it against the soft close darkness of the sky, Maria thought that she understood. It was not the sort of house with which one could forgo the niceties, not the sort of house one called upon without warning, and Robin squared his shoulders and set his feet. “Shall we?”

“After you,” Viv said, and they followed Robin across the cobbles, huddling in the doorway against the damp. He didn’t fumble with the keys, as one might expect after such an absence, but rested his hand on the door frame for a moment before trying the lock.

In the space between one breath and another, Maria held perfectly still, and didn’t know why she was waiting or what for, but Robin seemed to be doing the same — asking permission or begging forgiveness or, simply, seeing if he would be allowed — and, Maria realized, she trusted him. Whatever he was doing, and whyever it was important, she waited until he was content to stand aside and let them past. The door opened, and he waved them inside. “Bathrooms are at the end of the hall on each floor,” Robin said, “and sleep wherever suits. Though I wouldn’t recommend the bathmat,” he added to Maria. “I’m sure it’s disintegrating.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said drily. “I’m sure I’ll find somewhere.”

“Right,” Robin said, hand on the back of his neck, and seemed lost for words for a moment, as if he was trying to remember his way in the dark and found himself suddenly distrustful of his memory. “Right. I’ll be — you’ll — right.”

Brigid, who had been watching in silence, shook her head. “Wifi password?” she said. “I’m not using data. I don’t care if you’re having a stroke, as long as you tell me first.”

Robin stared blankly for a moment. “Router’s in the study,” he said, finally. “Down the hall, third door on the left, mind the carpet.”

“Right,” Brigid said, “thanks,” and thumped down the hallway.

“Shoes!” Simeon called after her, far too late, and Brigid’s cheery _Fuck off!_ echoed for a moment before a door opened and slammed. “Fuck’s sake,” he added, and turned back to Robin. “Sure you won’t stay?”

“Absolutely,” he said, and Maria thought: _you’re as hard to get into as heaven_. “Give me a shout if you need anything. I’ll hear it.” In the silence that followed, she wondered why; the order of the words, and their cadence, took her a moment to place, and even then she wasn’t quite sure. Maria had never been given to quotation or fiction, particularly, found its construction to be confusing more often than not. Occasionally certain phrases stuck, though, as if they carried weight, and snagged in her mind. The first time, it had been the beginning of a sentence, the barest flirtation with a new dogma: _It has not escaped our notice_ , a phrase which had caught between Maria’s teeth like the ragged edge of a torn fingernail, impossible to ignore once in evidence.

Another hesitation, and Maria wondered if he was questioning his words again, the reflexive nature of the reassurance: Robin, as far as she knew, was not a light sleeper. More than once she had come into the office when he’d stayed there for the night, and had made coffee and settled in with a stack of Ministry incident reports before he’d stirred. More often than not, she had forgotten that he was there — and when she remembered, could barely tell if he was breathing or not — until she’d slammed the drawer of a filing cabinet, or done something similarly noisy, and looked up to apologize only to realize that he’d slept through it.

Maria could never have brought herself to do that. Spent the night on an office sofa, forgotten to set an alarm, slept through the sunrise: she’d dozed in enough chairs in her graduate years for several lifetimes, all so that she’d never have to do it again. Another one of those luxuries afforded only, Maria thought, briefly resentful — and startled by the intensity of her feeling — before she could shake it, to _fucking_ wizards-in-denial. Give her a proper bed and an early alarm any day.

Looking at Robin in the dim glow of the entrance light, though, he didn’t seem to be lying; Maria put it down to a truth-by-circumstance, and a lie anywhere else, and nodded. “If I stand here any longer, I’ll end up sleeping in the hall,” she said, and started for the stairs. “Night, all.”

“Night,” Simeon said, and Viv inclined his head.

“Right,” Robin said, again, and Maria didn’t have to look to know that Viv had turned to him. Halfway up the stairs, she could still hear the defensive hastiness with which he added: “Same for me. See you in the morning, then,” and the brief sound of his footsteps on the cobbles before the door closed behind him.

It was funny, at least, to know that even wizards-in-denial — charming by nature, Maria supposed, even if they hadn’t shaved in what looked like a week and hadn’t slept in what looked like even longer — were subject to Viv’s scrutiny, and found it just as discomforting as she did.

The first door that Maria tried was a closet, and she considered it briefly — closet or not, it was already bigger than her kitchen in London — before closing it and trying the next. Windows, and the vertical regularity of bookshelves, and a real bed: Maria leaned on the door until it closed, and dropped her bag at the foot of the bed, and kicked her shoes off, and stopped herself before she buried her face in the pillows. Instead, she closed the curtains against the morning sun, and draped her skirt over the radiator to dry, and hung her blouse on the back of a chair.

Only then — all the correct steps taken, and nothing left undone to regret in the morning — did Maria allow herself to fall into bed, and pull the sheets up, and close her eyes.

The house was perfectly silent, and the room was perfectly dark; before she could begin to perceive either, and before her mind could begin to wander, Maria was asleep.

In the morning, she was woken by the cawing of rooks — close by, it seemed, and much louder than anything else she could hear: the piping of a robin, the rapid ball-bearing clicking of a wren, a passing engine, and then the rooks again — and Maria wondered, for a moment, if she could ignore all of it and go back to sleep, just this once.

She couldn’t, of course; that would be too simple, and Maria never could make things easy for herself. Instead, she lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling and accumulating enough resentment to force herself into motion. Finally — when it was a question of getting up or combusting from the sheer mass of hypothetical arguments that she had idly hosted in the meantime, all of them in the relative and unflattering silence of her own head — Maria sat up, and swung her legs out of bed, and stumbled over to the window.

Even through the curtains, she could tell that it was bright out, the peculiar cutting clarity that came even before the sky had cleared. Maria pulled back the heavy fabric — wrinkled her nose at the faint dry dustiness that resulted — and looked out across the courtyard below. She took stock: the erratic skew of the cobbles, still damp from the previous night; the annex across the way, and its craquelure of old vines; the garden beyond, all ivy and untended overgrowth; and over it all, the shadow of a massive oak.

For a second, Maria mistook its movement for the aftermath of some gale-force wind, but a moment later she understood it as the shuffling and squabbling of dozens of rooks. Blue-black feathers and bone-white beaks, like errant brushstrokes at the oak’s crown, and through it all the same hoarse cawing; Maria thought to herself: _I see Robin has his very own Tower, then_. It was fanciful, and carried the sort of implications that would irritate Robin, provoking the same weary denial as Brigid’s continual goading. Maria, not given to fancy, or at least to public indulgence in such, watched the shifting patterns of leaves on stone and allowed herself a momentary lapse. As it was, he didn’t seem to be in any danger of abandonment. Short of an act of God, or possibly some sort of multi-annual campaign involving napalm, the rooks seemed considerably more settled in their collective role than Robin ever would be in his.

It struck her again, then, the enormity of what they had done. They had changed the world, really done it, the way that all students thought they would — too untested to doubt their own ability to do so, and yet too clever to doubt the possibility of doing such a thing — and in a way really only comprehensible to the five of them. Maria traced the inked outline on her wrist, healed over now, but still sharp and new, and wondered if she would even be able to tell the difference; if she had always lived in an enchanted world, somehow; if waking up would be like this every day from now on. She had always wanted to know something that nobody else did, a true secret, and not one which she would have to barter away for power or politics or personal gain, and now she did. Shared over coffee and drinks and dinner at Viv’s, the simple impossibility of what they had done, the exhilaration of never having to slow down or explain herself or hold back: Maria tried, and failed, to imagine how dull her life must have been before.

In the daylight, it didn’t seem any less fundamental a change, or any less audacious. Maria let the curtain fall back into place, and dressed: her skirt was crumpled at the hem, and her blouse beyond salvation, so she picked the worst of the lint from her leggings and straightened out her camisole and hoped for the best. The hallway was empty, regardless, when she opened her door, and Maria expected to be accosted at any moment — by Robin’s ghosts, perhaps, or worse yet an uncaffeinated Brigid — but she made her barefoot way to the kitchen undisturbed, and only then happened upon Viv. He was in his usual pride of place, and had acquired a newspaper from God knew where; upon closer inspection, it was at least a decade out of date, but the coffee at least smelled relevant to current events.

There were a selection of mugs in the cabinet, and Maria picked the least offensive and washed the worst of the dust out, aware all the while of Viv’s default lack of affect. She poured from the cafetière, and rubbed at the remaining limescale on the beaker with her thumb, and waited to see what he would do. While most people would have registered some discomfort, or made some attempt at small talk to break the silence, Viv simply turned the page of his paper and set down his own coffee. “No milk, I’m afraid,” he said. “Red will go for supplies later, but until then we’ll have to make do.”

“I prefer mine without anyway,” Maria said, and then wondered why. It hadn’t come up in the months in which they had been working together, and it was the sort of thing one said to people in whom one had an interest, friendly or otherwise. It was an overture of the sort that she typically only made to complete strangers, or acquaintances who she wanted to know better with an intensity bordering on desperation. Viv was neither; Maria knew a little more about him than she would have liked, in point of fact, and suspected that if she learned any more she would be even less comforted by it. “Not that it matters.”

“No,” Viv agreed, and folded his paper in half at the puzzle section; he was in shirtsleeves for once, and looked just as polished and presentable without a cravat or cufflinks, collar open. His posture was no less uncompromising for the informal setting, and Maria drank her coffee and watched him trace his finger along the rows and columns.

After a minute, most of which Maria spent finishing her first mug and pouring another, she realized what Viv was doing, and how ostentatious it was: he was solving the crossword in his head, holding the grid of answers and possibilities in mental place as he built upon it. She shook her head. Viv — like the rest of them — was not given to unnecessary modesty, but Maria thought that he probably kept his more demonstrative tendencies in check for the most part. Once or twice, when they had still been getting to know each other, the slow process of circling and querying for vulnerabilities without giving away any of one’s own, she had asked Viv an innocuous question: about his investigative process, perhaps, or the application of logic and ethics to the unique situations that must therefore arise. It had been interview pap, the sort of personal question that merited a meaningless answer at best, but he had contemplated it for a moment longer than Maria had expected. Later, she had realized that he had been assessing her purpose, and modifying his answer accordingly. No doubt Viv had answered truthfully; she suspected, however, that he had selected the truth which he thought was least likely to make her uncomfortable.

It was unlike Viv, then, to show his hand like this, produce such a party-trick bagatelle without an obvious audience or objective. Halfway through her second coffee, Maria wondered — very quietly, so as not to attract his attention, or let it show on her face — if this was Viv’s way of expressing informality. Rather than his usual diversionary tactics, his mimicry of a certain ordinariness, Viv was sitting at the head of the table in the ancestral home of the last cunning man left of his line — drinking overbrewed black coffee from a chipped mug, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, barefoot — and doing a crossword in his head.

There was a certain inverse logic to the idea, once she had the trick of it. Thinking about it made Maria giddy, too, as if she had stolen fire from the gods herself, and she turned to rinse out her empty mug before she could give herself away. “Is it still damp out?” she asked, peering through the window over the sink. “I’d like to see the house by daylight, if it isn’t too muddy.”

“Not very.” Viv didn’t look up, and Maria left him to it, going back upstairs to look out at the garden again — probably a lost cause, at least until the sun had a chance to dry things out — and retrieve her shoes. Pausing by the window, she lost herself for another minute in the skidding of the clouds, the gradual shear of one stratus from the next, and almost missed the door of the annex opening. Briefly, Maria was tempted to turn away before Robin stumbled out and ruined her day. She hesitated, though, whether out of some intrinsic fatalism on her own part or a contrarian desire to see her predictions confirmed, and the strange newness of the universe complied, so it was not Robin who emerged but Simeon.

Unlike Robin, Simeon was at least marginally composed; certainly unlike Robin, he was good at masking an inherently furtive endeavor with purpose of movement and a certain unquestionable authority. There was no mistaking it, either: Maria knew enough about Simeon’s habits, both firsthand and from what fact she could sift from Brigid’s sarcasm, to recognize his composure as yet another diversionary tactic. Simeon, Brigid complained, wouldn’t get up before the evening if nobody made him. Maria, privately, thought that this was more likely a result of perpetual jet lag than any personal defect. The facts remained, however: Simeon was not a morning person, and even Maria, who was, found herself wishing for another — better — coffee; at this hour, therefore, Simeon was not likely to be awake by choice.

 _He’s been thrown out of bed_ , Maria thought gleefully, and almost flung herself down the stairs to intercept him. Halfway down, she remembered who had slept in the annex and therefore must have done said throwing, and nearly went face-first into the sideboard. Maria caught herself, though not before she had thoroughly bruised her hip on its corner, and — more than the pain — the impact of it jarred her back, briefly, into rationality. Running down the stairs like a child, and what was she going to say to Simeon anyway? Out of breath, Maria set her shoes down by the door, and decided that discretion was, occasionally, the better part of triumph. She ducked back into the kitchen, which Viv seemed to have vacated as silently as he had occupied it, and made sure that the doorway was out of her line of sight.

If it was immature of her, then, at least it was secretly so. Perhaps this was their doing, as well: this sudden impulsivity, the way that Maria felt so acutely impelled by every discovery, so impetuous and new. She waited until Simeon’s footsteps had passed, and went back out into the hallway; slipping on her shoes, Maria considered the chill lingering by the closed door, and the coatrack in the corner. It would be childish, Maria thought, to borrow Robin’s jacket in order to see how he would react.

It was equally childish to make such a fuss about a jacket. She picked the least crumpled from the rack — heavy twill, worn through at the cuffs — and settled it around her shoulders as best she could. Not very well: Robin was considerably broader than she was in the shoulders and chest, and Maria rolled up the sleeves and still felt as if she was drowning in fabric.

The previous night’s closeness and humidity had gone entirely, and Maria opened the door to a whisper of a breeze, which curled under her oversized collar and clutched at her wrists. She pulled the jacket closer around herself, and let the door swing closed. A few steps into the courtyard, unsteady on the uneven cobbles, Maria heard the click of a lighter, and said, without turning around: “Have you been there long, then?”

Brigid, perched on an upside-down flowerpot, shook her head. “Woke up early.” She took another drag and rattled the mug by her feet. “Say an hour, maybe. No chance of a fresh pot?”

“Not unless you like drinking tar,” Maria said, and fished around in the pockets of her borrowed jacket for something to do with her hands. String, some loose change, and what felt like a piece of twig and, when Maria checked, turned out to be precisely that: exactly what she should have expected, when she thought about it.

“That isn’t your jacket,” Brigid said, eyebrows raised. “I didn’t really have Sim pegged for the sharing sort, but there you go.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Maria said, and only realized afterwards that it was exactly the reaction that Brigid was had wanted. “Really, though. Sim. Sim and—” She trailed off, hoping for the best and expecting nothing less than what she got.

“Sim what?” Brigid said innocently. Maria, unsurprised but reluctant, did her best to convey the sentiment of _Sim and Robin_ through mime while Brigid watched with increasingly evident amusement. “Oh, all right,” she said finally. “Yes? Maybe? I don’t know, Maria. You know Robin. Some days I can’t even tell if he’s on the same planet, let alone in the same room.” She shrugged. “Sim’s a bit of an idiot about that sort of thing, sometimes.”

Maria looked down at Brigid — her hunched posture and muddy boots — and wondered, not for the first time, how she and Simeon got along so well. “What sort of thing?”

“You know,” Brigid said. “All that responsible _if I don’t do it nobody will_ bullshit. He isn’t used to it being about someone else instead of, oh, I don’t know. World peace. The job in front of him. Probably makes it worse.” She shrugged again.

“He feels responsible for Robin?” Maria said, and realized how stupid it sounded. They all did, a bit, in their different ways: she let him sleep in the office; Viv kept tabs on him when he could do so unobtrusively; Brigid nagged him to the point of distraction. Simeon, she supposed, was more a hands-on sort of person.

It was a particularly distracting thought, as such things went. Maria put it aside for later and watched as Brigid flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. “He enjoys it, really,” she said. “Likes a challenge. And he’s right, you know.”

“What?” Maria knew how she sounded, how sharply she said it. “About Robin needing some sort of a minder? Fuck’s sake.” She looked over at the annex, door still firmly closed. “He’s survived to adulthood. Surely he isn’t completely helpless.” She traced the cracks between the cobbles with the toe of her shoe. “A challenge,” she muttered. “Fucking Robin.”

“Maria,” Brigid said patiently, and Maria looked up. “I’ve had about five hours of sleep, thanks to those bloody birds and Viv’s internal fucking alarm clock, so everything is very abstract to me right now.” She glared. “Including the concepts of life, death, and giving a shit about either. Including yours in particular.”

“Sorry,” Maria said. “Tough night? Space station acting up?”

“Fuck off.” Brigid flips Maria off. “Do you want it to be?”

“Could it take out a very specific patch of land?” Maria asked. “Say, about from here—” she indicated, with her toe “—to here?”

Brigid thought about it for far too long, and then shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “But I can probably figure something out.”

“Thanks,” Maria said, and pinched the bridge of her nose. She sighed. “That was rude of me, wasn’t it?”

“Not wrong, though.” Brigid shrugged. “You think I care? Robin’s a fucking wizard. You’re a brainbox. Sim’s a spook and a pain, and Viv’s pretty much a complete fucking nightmare. I don’t give a shit.”

“Yes, but Robin,” Maria started, and left the end of the sentence hanging. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, or whether she wanted to say it to begin with.

“You know you do it too,” Brigid said, and Maria didn’t have to ask what she meant this time. She was just as guilty of coddling Robin as the rest of them: tried to edge around the reason he’d been brought on as a consultant in the first place; tried to edge around the gaps that he left in conversation for the unwary to fall into; tried to edge around the way she could never tell if she liked him, or hated him, or felt sorry for him — or both — or worse.

“There’s coffee left in the kitchen, if Viv hasn’t come back for it yet,” Maria said, and it occurred to her to question what Viv’s internal alarm clock — no doubt formidable in its regularity — had to do with Brigid’s disgruntled wakefulness. It also occurred to her, in very short order, that she wanted neither to ask for nor to receive an answer.

“Really?” Brigid said, shaking her hair out of her face, and straightened up so quickly that Maria nearly missed it. She watched Brigid, or rather the vague coffee-driven blur of her, disappear back inside, and shook her head. The end of Brigid’s cigarette was still glowing, a thread of smoke curling up from the cobbles, and Maria ground it out for her. She wouldn’t mind it so much, Maria thought, if it was Brigid they were humoring instead: she was mercurial and misanthropic on a good day, and actively hostile the rest of the time, but Maria liked her. The realization came as a surprise. She wasn’t used to liking people, not really, and had long since given it up as a lost cause. Better not to, anyway, not when it always ended the same way — it was like speaking different languages, Maria found, trying to make sense of each other — and better not to risk it.

Viv, though: that Maria could not imagine, and did not want to try, in a context involving Brigid or any other. Instead, she crossed the courtyard, and climbed the steps set into the garden wall: shale, slippery with moss, and rough-edged; just as much a part of the land as it was a part of the structure. The garden itself was overgrown, ivy and periwinkle creeping up the few stunted laburnum trees, and Maria lost the pathway somewhere amidst the stems and the overturned dark earth. It wasn’t that muddy after all, and she picked her way between burned azaleas deeper into the shade, rounding a last particularly territorial rhododendron, and there it was. Overgrown, roots knotted like old bones, the oak did not so much loom as much as it endured.

In its shadow, looking up at its mass, Maria thought that she understood the strange twilight in which Robin lived, the liminal space between the unreal and the real. Oaks could be the bones of giants, their last standing remains; older than Christ, and twice as tired. Like walking the Ridgeway, or striking flint at the foot of a barrow, or standing at the very edge of the outer circle of standing stones at Avebury, none of which Maria had ever done: she couldn’t tell if they were her thoughts, either, or simply the weight of story pressing at her temples. It was too easy to lose herself in the significance of such small things, like walking the same path over and over until it went from habit to ceremony, the sequential aggravation of a ritual scar or a turf-cut hill figure.

Robin, for all that he denied it, did precisely the same thing. Walked the same paths, correct in his conduct even as he denied its purpose: Maria had seen him flinch, once or twice, early in the morning or late at night, at empty air — in the doorway of the office, at the threshold of an alley — and then square his shoulders and walk on as if nothing had happened. She wondered if this was how he had been living all along, in a world of matter-of-fact enchantment, so completely encompassed by the inexplicable that he had no choice but to accept it as fact.

She wondered what she would do if the same happened to her, and then Maria thought: but it had, hadn’t it? They had done it to themselves, invested every moment from now on — every occurrence, from the most insignificant to the most rational — with that same nascent implication. There was a flapping, and the indignant caw of a displaced rook, and Maria thought idly of taking the auspices. She had never been much inclined towards divination, scientific or otherwise, but now it seemed to be as reliable a method as any other. The shifting of the leaves, and the muted quality of the light where it shone through, made Maria feel as if she was being held underwater, too overwhelmed to struggle and too disoriented to drown.

“Maria,” Robin said, and she turned. He must have been standing there for some time — hair a mess, hands in his pockets, and he looked just as tired as if he hadn’t slept at all — another thought that Maria didn’t particularly want to entertain if she didn’t have to. She felt as if she’d been caught out as it was: wearing his jacket, in his garden, slipping into his world and out of her own. Robin didn’t seem to notice, though. Maria wasn’t sure whether she was glad or not; it would have been nice to throw him off for once. It would have been nice if he had, for once, noticed: what, Maria wasn’t sure, but still. He gave her a wry half-smile, instead, as if he knew exactly how she felt, and Maria thought that he probably did. This was, after all, familiar ground to him. “You’re up early.”

“I usually am,” Maria said, and shook her head, clearing the last of the illusion from her mind. Ripples — breakers, she thought, ghost-breakers and the white horses that raced ahead of the tide — and they had skipped a stone across the surface of the world to see what would happen, hadn’t they? For the sake of living in, God forbid, interesting times; perhaps this was what they had wanted, all along. Perhaps from now on Maria would have to struggle to keep her head above water. Perhaps — for once, for blessed fucking once — each day would present some sort of challenge, and be worth facing. “So are you.”

“Yeah,” Robin said, and looked at his feet. _Great_ , Maria thought. _So we’re going to dance around this, because of Robin’s precious feelings, or whatever the hell it is this time_. She looked back up at the tree, careful not to lose herself in its patterns this time. “You’ve seen the garden, then.”

“Mostly I’ve seen this,” Maria admitted, and indicated the oak. “It must be centuries old.”

“More, probably.” Robin picked his way between the roots to lay his hand on its trunk, mottled and cracked, as if paying his respects. “I used to think it held up the sky.” He stepped away again, and closed his hand into a fist for a moment. “Probably not, but it’s easy to see where the stories come from, isn’t it?”

Maria nodded. “I used to climb the trees in our garden,” she said. “Rowans, nothing like this, but absolutely covered with berries in the fall. Back when I could fall out of them without breaking something, anyway.” She hesitated. “I used to make up all sorts of things. Talked to them, as well, all the usual things children do.”

“Rowan tree and red thread,” Robin said, the cadence of the words like a song. “Wayfarer’s tree, they called it.” There was a rustle far above, the faint rattling of branches and an angry chattering; after a moment, they heard the scrabbling of claws. Something brushed against Maria’s head, and she reflexively froze.

“Tell me that isn’t a squirrel,” she said.

Robin, smiling, shook his head. “Just a twig,” he said, and raised his hand, waiting for permission. Maria nodded. Instead of brushing it away, as she’d assumed, he tucked it behind her ear. “Laurels for the triumphant,” he said, “and oak for kings.”

“Well, that sounds like bullshit,” Maria said, before she could stop herself, and Robin laughed.

“Kipling,” he said. “Of all the trees that grow so fair, and we haven’t got ash or thorn handy.” He let his hand fall to his side, and Maria looked away.

The problem was that — for all that Robin drove her up the wall, and for all that she wanted, sometimes, to shove him down a flight of stairs — he did, really, understand. Robin had never questioned her, or doubted her judgment: he only made suggestions, and gave advice, and had never once brought up the possibility of more in heaven and earth. Maria was grateful for that — of course she was — but she had asked, once, unable to stop herself, how he knew. Robin had shrugged. “Heard it from the pixies,” he had said, offhand. “In the walls. They can smell genius. Joking,” he added, before she could begin to get the wrong idea; Maria had gotten the feeling, even then, that it was habitual. Robin seemed used to saying such things before remembering that he was the only one who would understand, making inside jokes with an audience of one, and then catching himself before he had to explain.

Maria had shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me much,” she said, and realized that he might take that the wrong way as well. “Brigid swears she hasn’t been leaving out milk, but, well.” Robin had rewarded her with a smile, one of his half-startled genuine affairs, as if perpetually surprised at his own capacity for humor, and she had chalked it up as a win, back before she began to hate such internal irrelevant scorekeeping.

“Anyway, no,” Robin had continued. “I saw your diplomas, in the filing cabinet, when I was looking for something. Sorry.”

“For what?” Maria had only kept them so that they could be looked at to begin with. If half a hundred dons who couldn’t tie their own shoelaces could do it, so could she, and most people had never even noticed anyway.

“Well, it’s very Viv, isn’t it,” Robin said, and it had been Maria’s turn to laugh.

“I suppose so,” she said, and hadn’t needed to ask again.

Now, standing in the shadow of something greater than either of them were, or would ever be, Maria wondered again whether it even mattered. Robin was looking, no matter what he might say, for a story to make sense of it all. He could no more escape it than any of them could — Maria with her theorems and Brigid with her code and Viv with his data — and, she supposed, Sim with his duty. “I don’t suppose you'd happen to have brought the athame,” Robin said, suddenly, and Maria looked up, startled.

“Actually, I did,” she said, almost reluctant to admit it. Since he had made the blade for her — forged it, Maria supposed — she had been carrying it around with a sort of anticipatory hope in her heart, almost as if she wanted an opportunity to test both it and herself. “Why?”

“I was hoping I could make some adjustments.” Robin straightened up, hands back in his pockets. “If you don’t mind. I have a workshop here, and I don’t think I’ll be back for a while after this, so.”

She nodded, slowly. If their worlds were merging, then it made sense to have a tool that could work in both, and where better to balance such a blade; she thought again of how she had felt submerged, and shivered. “Yes, of course.”

Robin inclined his head. “Thank you.” There was an odd ritual to it — the gesture, the words — and Maria watched as Robin shook himself free of it. He kneeled, instead, and laid his palm on the knuckle of an exposed root. “Every time I come back here,” he said, tone almost confessional, “I think I’ll never get away again.” Robin straightened up. “Don’t tell Brigid. You know what she’ll say.”

“I won’t,” Maria promised, and immediately swore at herself in her head. There, again, the same coddling, the promises for no reason, the inexplicable significance attached to things just because Robin was involved: she couldn’t seem to shake it.

Watching the slump of Robin’s shoulders, though, and the effort that it seemed to cost him to straighten up, Maria couldn’t help but wonder if there was a certain truth to it. Stories wore their way into the world, like well-trodden paths for those who could see them, and Robin certainly could. Sometimes she wondered if he was simply waiting out his time, living backwards until — finally — he could no longer escape the inevitable.

Give her conflict, Maria thought, any day; give her strife, give her struggle, give her a burden greater than she could bear, and a world moving too quickly for her to keep up, and then — finally — she might be able to rest.

Not for long, though: only until she was needed again. “There might be coffee left, if Brigid hasn’t finished it,” Maria said, breaking the silence. “You look like you could use a cup.”

Robin shrugged. “All right,” he said. “I suppose work can wait.”

He stood, watching, until Maria realized that he was waiting, and turned away from the oak. “Well, come on,” she said, and began to pick her way out of the garden. The path was visible, now that Robin had cleared it, the same stepping-stone sheaves as the wall and the steps, and Maria followed it back to the courtyard, careful of the moss.

Behind, Robin followed her, and the wind crept after both of them, whispering with promises: of newness, wholly of their doing, and of a different day tomorrow — and the next — and another after that.


End file.
